Changes of note are mentioned here. The end has a story by Jeffrey Friedl about
how this whole thing got started. Note that anything done since
15 years, 9 months ago has not been done by Jeffrey.
(Note: this is a mirror for
Jeffrey's main dictionary server in the US).

Changes, going backwards in time:

2 years, 5 months ago

Many internal changes to the operation of the server (about time too!) but
nothing that affects the way it works for users. Among the changes were
dropping the links to the defunct mirror at Lund, Sweden as well as removing
a lot of old HTML markup that simply isn't supported any more.
Also graphics generation has been disabled at the
San Jose, California, USA mirror at the request of its host,
Jeffrey.

3 years, 11 months ago

Updated auto-update to now include compdict in the updates
to the J-E server.

4 years, 0 months ago

Implemented a request by Peter Jakobi to have romaji optionally displayed
along with results when using any of the Japanese encodings. So for those
of you who don't use the graphical portion of the server (the one which allows
kanji and kana GIF generation), you'll now not need to have two browsers
open to get romaji in one to compare to the encoding non-graphical version
in the other.

6 years, 5 months ago

Thanks to Maya Pedersen for pointing out the unobvious: Kanji
lookup when using romaji readings doesn't trigger a fuzzy search.
Onna won't work, but omna does. A link has been placed to remind users
how to instruct the romaji conversion engine to more finely search for
romaji using this server's romaji flavor.

6 years, 1 month ago

After what seems to be an eternity, the UNICODE encoding option seems
to have been tested long enough on the test server,
so it's time to roll that out to all the mirrors. Note that by request,
the mirror in New Hampshire USA has had GIF generation
disabled due to loading problems. (Note that GIF generation may get
disabled everywhere some time in the far future - these days everyone
ought to have native capability for viewing Japanese in their web
browsers.)

7 years, 4 months ago

7 years, 4 months ago

Major update to the CGI, as the server now accepts and emits UTF-8. So
you can paste into the search boxes any UTF-8 character safely and the
server should be able to deal with it. Note GIF generation, all other
features, etc. will work for this encoding as others do.

7 years, 5 months ago

Many updates, specifically:

Found a bug in the JIS-X-0212 fonts and rebuilt them to the appropriate
scale and size

Added JIS-X-0212 big ASCII kanji to the Kanji lookup feature.

ASCII Kanji generation restored to customizations.

64-pixel size for image inlining is now supported, again generating an
SNF font using the Sazanami Mincho fonts.

Alright, let's go super-jumbo: 96-pixel generation is available now.

Added a third and fourth search option to the kanji lookup, which let's you
paste a kanji character to search for, and updated the documentation to
reflect this and search exclusively by radical visually, respectively.

Increased the hard limit of 350 kanji results returned to 500 in the
Kanji database search.

12 years, 8 months ago

Added Jean-Marc Desperrier'sDictionnaire français-japonais. Note that this
dictionary can be searched if you selected no encoding at the introductory
page (use GIF generation instead). This is because the server is currently
unable to display results in UTF-8.

12 years, 11 months ago

Thanks to the original author Jeffrey Friedl himself, this server now has another
mirror. Also updated kanjidic and enamdict.

13 years, 2 months ago

Thanks to Jim Breen for hosting the Australian mirror of this
server!!!

13 years, 3 months ago

Yay! The server can now be partially customized!! The kanji lookup isn't
quite ready for primetime, but at least the main dictionary gateway can be
customized as need be. There are still some bugs
here and there, but they'll be fixed as time goes on. At least that ends
that part of the server's modernization. The remaining work involves the
kanji database lookups, which has been in neglect since 1996. Also managed
to add some missing icons for the other dictionaries.

15 years, 7 months ago

15 years, 7 months ago

Fixed several typos that still permeated within the prose. Made
preparations for the J-E server's new home. Made lots of link
updates, and included a link to Jim Breen's new WWWJDIC
server.

15 years, 9 months ago

The dictionary server has been handed off to William Maton. So perhaps,
there may be new features added and enhancements made - or not. Actually
the changes are likely to be very subtle in terms of keeping it running, but
the overall structure of the server is not likely to change.

16 years, 10 months ago

17 years, 0 months ago

This site seems to run by itself pretty well -- no major time put into it
in ages, but there was a bunch of cleanup that needed to be done. All
references to the old Omron sites have been removed, and some of the data
files and programs have been updated to work with the changes in the
most-recent dictionary data.

Also, added information on how to get Japanese TrueType fonts for Windows
platforms, and new information about Microsoft's new Input Method Editor
(so you can enter Japanese text, even while using the English version of
Windows). See the overview page.

17 years, 5 months ago

Finally got around to removing references to the mirror in America, which
has not been available for some time.

17 years, 9 months ago

Information on Jack Halpern's
New Japanese-English Character Dicitonary now online.
It's a fantastic dictionary of kanji for the student of kanji.
(Also see my discussions of dictionaries for more information
on the differences among the ``kanji dictionaries'' out there.)

17 years, 9 months ago

The Kenkyuusha dictionary site went to a paid-only site, so
my support for them has been removed.

17 years, 10 months ago

Added some font information for Navigator and Explorer users
here. (Thanks go to David Hicks for some help
here).

17 years, 11 months ago

Finally got around to updating my home page to note that I now
work at .
(Yahoo Japan is here.)

18 years, 1 month ago

Thanks to help from 猪瀬源太郎 (Gentaro Inose), tidied up some of the
Japanese pages.

18 years, 1 month ago

Added the ability to suppress the
fuzzy lookup of Japanese searches. Made non-fuzzy the
default when using the Japanese-language interface. Thanks to Brandon
Phillips for the idea.

18 years, 5 months ago

18 years, 9 months ago

Fixed a perl5 bug (affecting the Canadian server) that caused the kanji
pictures in the kanji database to screw up. My thanks to Martin Minich
<Martin.Minich@st.fmph.uniba.sk> for pointing out the problem.

18 years, 10 months ago

Had a bug whereby a kanji's readings (in the kanji database)
weren't being sent via the proper encoding. Thanks to Leo Yamamoto
(mooman@mail.utexas.edu) for pointing out the problem.

18 years, 11 months ago

Backed out the change to the HTTP header that supplied the character
encoding. Seems lots of browsers don't like it. Perhaps it's my
misunderstanding of the HTTP spec....

18 years, 11 months ago

Added the pages on kanji dictionaries (let me know what you
think) and radicals, and updated a lot of intra-site
links.
★
Added more information for users of Netscape Navigator
about a bug with their Japanese display.
★
Also added charset information to the
HTTP header
(as well as providing it via a <META HTTP-EQUIV...>HTML tag, as I
have been for a while).
★
Made it so that prose pages expire ``real soon'' if they're grabbed while
I'm in the process of working on the server. Otherwise, they expire after a
month.
Note: if your browser information screen says there's
no expiration, or perhaps a crazy date (like 1970), then you're probably
going through a proxy that takes care of the caching.

18 years, 11 months ago

18 years, 11 months ago

You can now enter multiple indices when doing an Index Search in the
kanji database, or multiple stroke counts, etc., when doing
a Cull Search.

19 years, 0 months ago

Added the ability to remove colors and background, 'cause no matter what you
choose, someone will not find them viewable, or even if viewable,
appealing.

19 years, 0 months ago

Fixed a recently-introduced bug that had kept customization from working,
various spiff-ups, and substantially enhanced the Kenkyusha link
information (to take into account that they don't support fuzzy searches).

19 years, 0 months ago

If you use raw Japanese support
(which you are now),
I now include links to Kenkyuusha dictionaries on-line with
the results of lookups at this server. Their interface and search engine
isn't as nice as mine, but if you can read Japanese, the results are
much more detailed (it's a real dictionary).

The information about these dictionaries came along with a slew of other
helpful comments from Yoshiyuki Mizuno
Thanks!

19 years, 0 months ago

As suggested by William Maton,
I've changed the default for inlined text -- they will now not be inlined
if they contain no kanji (since there's really no additional information
beyond what the romaji gives you). However, you can if you like select to
have the kana-only entries inlined as well -- just check the appropriate
box on either the customization page or the main dictionary
page.

19 years, 0 months ago

Added support for the new kanjidic fields:
O'Neill indices and Korean Readings.

Added search support for multiple dictionaries, and now support four
(edict, and the name file that was split off from it,
a legal dictionary, and a life-science dictionary).

Added support for raw JIS input. I didn't realize that any browsers
allowed this (none of mine do), but I suddenly noticed a ton of errors
in the log about this, so added support for it.

Added a note to the overview about a company in America
that sells the Canon Wordtank
and other hard-to-find items.

Adding colors and such.
But I still want to make sure it works even on B&W non-graphical
browsers, so please let me know if it screws up
with your favorite browser.

These changes are ongoing this week, so things might not work from
time-to-time (the mirror in Canada won't be updated until I
get things settled, so feel free to use it instead).

19 years, 2 months ago

Fixed a stooopid bug that caused the input of Japanese via ``!JIS'' codes
to not work at the Canadian mirror. For the same reason (byte ordering
differences), the EUC/KUTEN, etc. had been reported incorrectly in the
kanji lookup page. Sorry!
Thanks to Marco De la Cruz for
pointing out these problems.

19 years, 4 months ago

Due to a most-cool suggestion by Armen Nakashian
(anakashian@shell.monmouth.com), you can now have dictionary
results returned with kanji information linked in.

19 years, 4 months ago

Also added a 'Last-Modified' field to the header of most pages. Although
each page is constructed on a per-request basis, the last-modified date
will represent the last time the ``page's pattern'' changed.

19 years, 9 months ago

19 years, 9 months ago

Added the ability to accept Shift-JIS directly in a search query (your browser
may still not allow you to enter it, but if it does, I'll now recognize
it). Previously, only EUC was allowed. But then I tried a
Netscape browser that allowed me to copy
(ctrl-C) and paste (ctrl-V) into the search window, but it always pasted as
Shift-JIS. So now I keep two browsers running... a short one across the top
of the screen with my dictionary server, and the main one I'm browsing in.
When I hit some Japanese I don't know (not hard to do), I just copy and
paste to the server window and zappo, I'm informed.

19 years, 10 months ago

Added the kanji database
customization -- can now customize the wazoo out of the thing.

19 years, 10 months ago

Added first semblance of a new feature --
ASCII picture representations of kanji. Sort of neat, especially if you're
on a TTY-based browser. See the customization page.

20 years, 8 months ago

Previously....

I started keeping this log here only with that last entry (May 13, 1995)
above. However, this server has been around for some time.

I've been a CS/UNIX geek since 1980 or so, but was slow
to find out about The Web. The first times I vaguely heard about it, I
thought it was just a fancy GUI to FTP. But wow, I was sure wrong. I first
saw a web browser (Mosaic for the X Windowing System) on June 13th, 1994
(about 20 years, 10 months ago). Two days later, I wrote to
a friend:

After playing with the [Xerox PARC] map server
(http://pubweb.parc.xerox.com/map/),
I thought it might be cool to provide a
Japanese⇔English
dictionary the same way.

I knew I'd need to transfer Japanese text as GIFs, so the next day I
scrounged up a copy of the GIF standard and wrote some perl scripts to
generate them. Then I modified my lookup program to run as
a server in the background, then set my sights on creating the Web
interface. Soon got something up and running, but since I was still learning
about what the whole Web really was, what it had to offer, and most
importantly, how it worked, my first cut at a server was a bit kludgey.

By June 23 I had something ready to put up for the world, but unfortunately,
at the time my company's server was not
accessible from outside. However, I still had accounts at
Carnegie Mellon University, so contacted the
webmaster about putting up the server.

It took a while to get the permission and everything set up, so I wrote a
lot of the prose pages while waiting. Eventually the permission came
through, and the first successful lookup occurred at about 11am on June 30,
1994 JST.

So, I guess that officially makes the server about 20 years, 9 months ago
old.

My accounts eventually expired at CMU, so the dictionary server there was
shut down. Grand total there was 280,258 accesses. This particular
mirror
has had 19,198 accesses.

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